89 Quotes by Madeleine K. Albright

Most of us lived through the years when spam threatened to destroy e-mail. Today, democracy is being weakened by lies that come in waves and pound our senses the way a beach is assaulted by the surf. Leaders who play by the rules are having trouble staying ahead of a relentless news cycle and must devote too much effort trying to disprove stories that seem to come out of nowhere and have been invented solely to do them in.

no country has the right to dictate to others how they should be governed; but we all have good reason to speak up on behalf of democratic values

The inherent tensions between the White House and the press should not worry a president who is disciplined about observing certain elementary tactics of survival. Take responsibility, admit mistakes, put out bad news quickly, and acknowledge inconsistencies before others point them out.

History has been unkind to timid presidents. It has been downright cruel to those who think themselves above the Constitution.

A Fascist, however, expects the crowd to have his back. Where kings try to settle people down, Fascists stir them up so that when the fighting begins, their foot soldiers have the will and the firepower to strike first.

When the Führer predicted a quick victory over England, implying Spain could wait not longer if it wanted to share in the triumph, Franco doubted the scenario, before adding that even if the Germans were to capture London, the British would continue fighting from Canada.

In hindsight, it is tempting to dismiss every Fascist. . . as a thoroughly bad guy or a lunatic, but that is too easy, and by inducing complacency, also dangerous. Fascism is not an exception to humanity, but part of it. Even people who enlisted in such movements out of ambition, greed, or hatred likely were unaware of, or denied to themselves, their true motives.

Though I had never written a memoir, I was confident that given enough time, I could do a serviceable job. Not elegant, but blunt, informative and funnier than most readers would expect.

He initiated a campaign to drenare la palude (“drain the swamp”) by firing more than 35,000 civil servants.